Rob Dunn
- Never Home Alone
Leeuwenhoek was better at seeing this world, in all its grandeur, than anyone else. But doing so took work that others considered to be impossibly hard. So the members of the Royal Society, despite having seen the world Leeuwenhoek discovered, failed to continue to study it in any real earnestness. After verifying Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microbes, Hooke continued to look at microscopic life through his own microscopes for about six months. But then he was done.
George Eliot
- Middlemarch
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling-an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects-that he had an equivalent center of self.
Sheri Fink
- From: Five Days at Memorial
The hurricane cut off city power. The hospital's backup generators did not support air-conditioning, and the temperature climbed. The well-insulated hospital turned dank and humid; Thiele noticed water dripping down its walls. On Tuesday, the floodwaters rose.
Nick Pyenson
- Spying on Whales
Scattered around the peninsula are several islands like the one we approached, islands that served as barely inhabitable platforms for whaling operations in the early and midtwentieth century. Today the only remnants of human civilization are occasional concrete pylons with bronze plaques identifying the area as an open air heritage site, and leftover whale bones.
